Trolls World Tour (2020)

Honestly, there are times when I just don't want to write a review of something I have watched. But I made my viewing choice, I wanted it to go on my blog, and now I am up at 0530 in the morning to write about Trolls World Tour because there are only 24 hours in a day and I was too tired last night to get this done ahead of time.

Following on from the horribly average, but I guess successful enough, Trolls, this sequel comes along to make you look back on that averageness with fondness, and yearn for those good old times when the worst thing a Troll movie did was rework some classic singalong tunes alongside some kid-friendly visuals.

This is horrible. Really horrible. If it wasn't for the charm of San Rockwell (yes, even in animated form, his charm blasts out of the screen and helps things along), I am not sure I would have given it such a relatively high rating.

The slight plot concerns the fact that our two main trolls, Poppy and Branch, find out they are one of a number of troll tribes. Each tribe is aligned with a certain type of music. You have the ones we already know from the first movie, pop trolls, and you also have ones that enjoy techno, classical, country, funk, and rock music. Queen Barb heads up the rock music trolls, and she wants to collect the one guitar string from each troll territory before bringing everyone together into one big world of rock.

Yeah. Although the main message here is about valuing individualism over conformity, it's hard to see beyond the fact that a) trolls are only individual when compared to other tribes, so that's a stumbling block for the main message, and b) rock is pretty much shown as an evil kind of music over all the others.

Everyone returns to the main voice roles they had in the first movie, and Kendrick and Timberlake are still just fine in the leads, although James Corden still gets a few lines to give him the potential to spoil things by being James Corden. Rachel Bloom is suitably loud and impetuous as Queen Barb, and there are cameo roles for Ozzy Osbourne, Kelly Clarkson, George Clinton, and Mary J. Blige (to show that the makers of the movie DO know some people who sing songs that aren't just upbeat pop tunes). I already mentioned Rockwell, but he's definitely worth mentioning again.

Walt Dohrn returns to co-direct, this time with David P. Smith alongside him (his first feature). Everything is as you'd expect from a sequel to Trolls, although maybe slightly worse in the obviousness of the various design choices and attempts to build different worlds.

Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger are back to write the screenplay, helped along by Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky, and Elizabeth Tippet. Five people. It took five people to write this piece of crap, and yet there still isn't enough here to make it worth your time. No great character moments, no funny lines of dialogue to single out, no redeeming value in the muddled message at the heart of it all. Even the soundtrack is just a big mess.

One to avoid, although I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who felt differently about this. It's one of those films that you find hard to consider anyone being a fan of.

3/10

You can buy this shiny set here.
Americans may want to go for this.

Trolls (2016)

I think it's always important when discussing a movie aimed at children to remind people of how immature and childish I can be. When people tell you to try remembering how it felt like to be a wide-eyed child . . . I'm already there. I'm not going to compare a children's movie to, say, Casablanca (although some are gold-plated classics in a different way from that Bogart vehicle), but I am still going to expect it to do a certain job.

Trolls is an odd film in almost every sense. First of all, it's based on those little troll dolls that I thought had faded out of our shared consciousness back in the 1990s (the last thing I remember about them was a console game on the Sega Mega-CD, I want to say). Second, it's a film that patches together a number of horrible cover versions of songs, almost as if every main scene was initially planned to be the standard finale/credit sequence we've seen in dozens of other big animated releases. Third, the story is a bit wild, being all about a race of creatures that believe eating the trolls is the secret to happiness.

You find that out at the very start of the movie. The Bergens are about to have their annual feast of trolls, served up by the Chef (Christine Baranski), but they find that the trolls have escaped. Some years pass by, trolls live in a new area, they sing and dance (which is what they do), and have hug time every half an hour. Poppy (Anna Kendrick) is a most vocal fan of all of this stuff. Branch (Justin Timberlake) is not. He's too busy worrying about when the Bergen will find them and whisk them all away to be eaten. And so, when a load of the trolls are found by the Bergen and whisked away to be eaten, Poppy and Branch head off to rescue their troll buddies.

It's bright, it's full of excerpts from popular songs (with the main theme being that they're all upbeat singalong favourites, from what I can recall), and it has enough to keep younger viewers entertained. But that doesn't make it actually any good. It makes it passable, average, it's the bare minimum to be expected from a mainstream animated release from a major studio. Director Mike Mitchell has films on his CV that prove he can do much better than this. Co-director Walt Dohrn, on the other hand, will have to work harder on future projects to make me forget his name is attached to this.

Writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have been involved with some treats (the Kung Fu Panda movies stand out from their filmography). This seems like a thankless task for them. The characters aren't too bad, although often defined by one main trait, but the script is simply required to hop from one peppy song moment to the next.

The voice cast almost make up for the rest of the negatives. Kendrick is always someone I enjoy onscreen, and her personality is perfectly suited to her character here. Timberlake is very good, and Baranski is superb as the mean Chef. Chriostopher Mintz-Plasse is a grumpy young King, Zooey Deschanel is a staff member who is smitten with the King, Russell Brand is a guru type of troll, Kunal Nayyar voices someone very glittery, and there's a turn from James Corden that is small enough to have him be almost tolerable.

Trolls is average, at best. It's easy to see why kids will enjoy it. The tunes, the bright colours, the cute characters. It's also easy to see that it was put together without any of the care or detail that goes into so many other movies looking to capture the attention of the same demographic.

5/10

Here's a shiny set available.
Americans can buy this disc.